Question

Im doing research and I downloaded a test app that calls a standard .asmx service. The service is being called using a standard POST request. Im slightly confused because I thought .asmx services always used SOAP? Or is the ability to communicate with HTTP (POST) something that was introduced recently?

Answer 1

.NET Web-Services uses the one protocol you choose. By deafult it is the SOAP, and POST requests are allowed.

Standart help page automatically created by .NET:

POST /demo/MSDN/PerfCounter.asmx HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 150
Content-Type: text/xml
Host: localhost
User-Agent: MS Web Services Client Protocol 1.0.2204.19
SOAPAction: "http://tempuri.org/PerfCounters"

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" 
               xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" 
               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-instance" 
               xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema">
  <soap:Body>
    <PerfCounters xmlns="http://tempuri.org/"/>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Also you can enable the GET method:

<configuration>
    <system.web>
    <webServices>
        <protocols>
            <add name="HttpGet"/>
            <add name="HttpPost"/>
        </protocols>
    </webServices>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

This works from .NET 1.1